Senior Software Engineer at Groma

Please note that this role is full-time in-office and based in Boston, MA.

Groma is blending real estate and technology to unlock a new real estate asset class while making it easier for everyone, from institutional investors to the residents in our buildings, to participate in ownership. Our property technology platform uses AI to bring new efficiencies to the small unit count multifamily sector, enabling us to efficiently acquire, upgrade, and operate these 2-20 unit multifamily buildings and bring institutional performance to this massive but historically overlooked sector. Our investor technology platform makes owning these assets accessible to a broad array of investors, with bespoke vehicles available to institutional and family office investors and our flagship vehicle, the blockchain-powered GromaREIT, available to everyone, with a special focus on enabling ownership for the residents in our buildings. Visit www.groma.com to learn more about us.

About the Role

This senior-level role will join a small team of software engineers that build the digital infrastructure and products that power the company. These primarily include:

• Tools that are designed to make managing our large and growing real estate portfolio highly efficient. These are tools that we use to address the tactical challenges that arise from managing distributed real estate assets as efficiently as possible while still ensuring the best possible resident experience. We use many standard technology solutions, but also smart home technology and AI to solve and optimize many of our resident and maintenance tasks.
• Products that enable investors to initiate and manage their investments into Groma’s real estate funds. A primary goal of Groma is to make real estate work better for everyone. This means not only owning and managing it well, but also expanding ownership opportunities, with audiences ranging from institutional investors to the residents in our buildings.
• Infrastructure to express Groma’s property assets and investor share holdings in a blockchain environment. Blockchain is a powerful tool for us to increase transparency, investor access, and, over time, unlock new functionality to enable our holders to get the most possible value out of owning real estate.

The most important traits for someone joining the team will be:

• Startup interest. We’re an early stage company and still have a lot left to figure out. We don’t yet have all of the answers, and you’ll be a part of finding them. 
• Product mindset. As a startup, we need to be fast to identify and solve problems across the business. We expect engineers to be comfortable working directly with stakeholders throughout the business to understand their needs and build pragmatic solutions to them.
• Technical breadth. As a small team, it’s highly valuable for each member to be able to operate across the entirety of our technology stack. This means being willing and able to work on backend and frontend development, our blockchain infrastructure, or occasionally even some spreadsheet hacking.
• Desire to move fast. As an engineering team, we care about building reliable, secure, and easily-maintainable systems, but also strive to move quickly and are willing to make compromises where necessary to support the business.

The core technologies that the team uses are:

• Languages: Python, Javascript, Solidity
• Frameworks: Django, React
• Infrastructure: Google Cloud, Postgres, Ethereum, Vercel

This is a role for someone that can quickly ramp up to execute independently and effectively across the range of technologies described above. You do not need to be an expert in everything mentioned, but should be very comfortable building web applications in Django or a comparable framework and at least interested in learning the rest.

About our Culture

At Groma, we’re looking to build something big and are on a fast growth trajectory. While a healthy work-life balance is important to our team, we want to be upfront that there may be times when we expect commitments outside of the standard 9-5. We strive to respect individuals and their needs, while also acknowledging the reality that we have a small team that is trying to accomplish some very ambitious goals in a short period of time.

We are also focused on maintaining our dynamic in-office culture at Groma’s headquarters in beautiful downtown Boston, Massachusetts. We believe that in-person collaboration and spontaneous interpersonal interaction is critical to the company’s success at this stage. Also, our office is great. We own the whole building and have made it very much our own space. We’ve got a gym, locker rooms, a game room, a rooftop garden, and all the normal stuff to make an office an effective and fun place to be. We understand that everyone will occasionally need flexibility, but want to be transparent with this expectation.

We have an ever-evolving list of values and conventions that guide how we operate as a company, but here are some of our core ones:

• We approach our work with pragmatic idealism that enables us to focus on our desire to make the world a better place in ways big and small while also being open to intelligent compromises that accelerate us on our path to serve our broader societal goals.
• Our whole team believes strongly that the challenges we are trying to solve require effective teams, not individual heroes.
• We have complex conversations well. We sit at the intersection of housing and blockchain policy, both nuanced topics with real world impacts. We pride ourselves on being thoughtful, seeking the best solutions to real world challenges, and implementing them effectively in the real world.

Disclaimers

While we think that this role is an amazing opportunity for the right candidate, we also want to be upfront about some of the reasons that it might not be a fit for you:

• You want to work in a partially or fully remote environment. We take great care to enable flexibility for team members, but our default will always be to be in office together.
• You just want to write code and are less interested in learning about the business. We expect engineers to spend lots of time with stakeholders figuring out what the right problems are to solve (i.e. doing "product" work), then building the solutions to them.
• Job titles are important to you or you're looking for a quick pathway into engineering management. We're a small, very flat organization and intend to keep it that way for the foreseeable future. That said, there are many other types of leadership opportunities available.
• You want a highly predictable job. We're a startup and there have been and will continue to be lots of twists and turns in our story - we change direction quickly and throw a lot of things against the wall to see what sticks.

Job Benefits

• Competitive salary for the Boston area
• Early stage equity
• 5% 401k match
• 100% employer-paid premiums for high-quality health, dental, and vision insurance plans
• Fully covered commuter passes for bus, subway, boat, or commuter rail
• Unlimited PTO
• 13 official company holidays
• 1 floating holiday: We recognize that there are lots of holidays that are meaningful to different people in different ways and we want to celebrate that by enabling team members to have the time/space to commemorate those days however is appropriate, and using it as an opportunity - if they’d like to - to share the meaning of that day with the broader team
• A beautiful office in downtown Boston with a gym, locker rooms, game room, rooftop garden, and at least one catered lunch and breakfast per week